“The problem is, that alongside increased inequality, we’ve seen diminished levels of upward mobility in recent years. A child born in the top 20 percent has about a two in three chance of staying at or near the top. A child born into the bottom 20 percent has a less than one in 20 shot at making it to the top. He’s 10 times likelier to stay where he is.”

The Economic Policy Institute’s “State of Working American, 12th Edition,”released last year, echoed that sentiment, finding that “U.S. mobility is among the lowest of major industrialized economies.”

The following hard-hitting post on the release of the PISA scores was written by Richard Rothstein, research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit organization created to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers, and Martin Carnoy, education professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. It explains what international test score results really mean and what they don’t mean, and also explains why the authors believe the U.S. Education Department is attempting not only to inform the public about the results but “to manipulate public opinion.” This piece will appear on the EPI website.

“I personally have Clinton fatigue,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute, noting that it was a Clinton team that has been running Obama’s economics. “A Clinton administration seems like a continuation of the same team.”

Some consider the debate an opportunity for Hillary Clinton to embrace a more populist message. Bill de Blasio, a Democrat who was her New York campaign manager in 2000, was just elected mayor of New York on an inequality agenda.

For the past two years, unemployment has been higher for only one other racial or ethnic group: blacks. Unemployment for Native Americans has remained above 10 percent for five years, weighing in at 11.3 percent for the first half of this year, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on the needs of low- and middle-income workers.

Now, Lawrence Mishel, Heidi Shierholz and John Schmitthave released a new study that questions SBTC as an explanation for increasing wage inequality. Mishel et al. argue that “job polarization,” the premise that more jobs have been created in low-wage sectors and high-wage sectors, thus driving wage inequality, doesn’t actually explain the problem. On the one hand, high-wage occupations have not significantly expanded their share of the workforce since 2000. On the other, low-wage jobs have not increased as a total share of employment since 1979.

He pointed to a study by economists at the Federal Reserve in Chicago, which found that a dollar-an-hour increase would translate into a $700 increase in spending per quarter the year after enactment for each household with a minimum-wage earner. Nearly four million workers earn the minimum wage, but the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, estimates that wages for 30 million workers would be lifted if Congress approved an increase to $10.10 an hour. Mr. Krueger was co-author of a landmark study that found that a modest increase in the minimum wage did not result in hiring cutbacks.

So a minimum-wage increase would help low-paid workers, with few adverse side effects. And we’re talking about a lot of people. Early this year the Economic Policy Institute estimated that an increase in the national minimum wage to $10.10 from its current $7.25 would benefit 30 million workers. Most would benefit directly, because they are currently earning less than $10.10 an hour, but others would benefit indirectly, because their pay is in effect pegged to the minimum — for example, fast-food store managers who are paid slightly (but only slightly) more than the workers they manage.

Switzerland is hardly unique in that. For example, the ratio of earnings between CEOs and typical workers at the 350 largest U.S. corporations is now 273-1, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Everywhere you look, company bosses have been getting richer and richer. It is a global trend — and there is very little sign of it ending. If anything, the extremes keep getting worse.

There are also questions about whether the test scores show what they pretend to show. A report released early this year by Martin Carnoy of the Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute raised questions about whether the average scores in the 2009 PISA were reported lower than they should have been.

“This fraud would have to be so widespread, to affect enough of the survey takers to affect the top-line numbers, that it seems implausible on the face of it,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist who studies unemployment at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

The 0.3-percent decline in unemployment in September 2012 was not an unusually large change, Shierholz pointed out — the unemployment rate tends to be volatile. Unemployment also fell by 0.3 percent in November 2011, less than a year earlier. September’s drop, though large, was not out of line with the overall trend in unemployment, which has continued to decline steadily, if slowly, in the year since the election.

According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, the economy would have needed to add about 90,000 jobs a month to keep up with the increase in the population since 2007. Based on this figure, the U.S. would have needed to add 8 million more jobs to provide for the number of people joining the workforce in the last six years.

The left-of-center Economic Policy Institutehas estimatedthat the expiration of the emergency jobless benefits program would reduce job growth by 310,000 positions next year because consumers over all would have less money to spend. Michael Feroli, chief United States economist at JPMorgan Chase,has estimatedthat it would drain about four-tenths of a percentage point from first-quarter economic growth.

That growth brought the total number of one-percenter households in the area to just under 54,000. You might be wondering: Who, exactly, are those people? How do they get their money? We wondered the same thing, and we asked the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank with a lot of experience studying the make-up of the 1 percent nationally, to help us figure it out. It analyzed detailed Census data and produced the charts you see below.

Mr. Mishel’s preferred explanation of inequality’s rise is institutional: a shrinking minimum wage cut into the earnings of the nation’s least-skilled workers while falling trade barriers, deregulation and the decline of labor unions eroded the income of the middle class. The rise of the top 1 percent, he believes, is mostly about executive pay and the growing footprint of finance.

A recent study by the Rand Corporation predicted out-of-pocket medical expenses will decline for most people who are newly insured or change their health plans. Then there are the almost nine million more people who will be covered by Medicaid, says Josh Bivens with the liberal Economic Policy Institute. Others will get subsidies to buy insurance.

“In my mind this is kind of like a delayed, small stimulus program, because it’s actually providing people who are otherwise cash-constrained to give them more income in the next couple years,” Bivens says.

It’s hard to say exactly how many of Washington’s households in the top 1 percent draw their incomes from the broad business of serving, supplying or influencing the government. But an analysis of tax data by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the area’s 1-percenters are most likely to be lawyers and executives, or people who work in management consulting or IT. Nearly 1 in 10 of those households is headed by a government worker.

“It’s slowing the recovery from the recession because people have less money in their pockets to spend on goods and services provided by other businesses,” noted Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. “These young people are delaying their saving for retirement, their ability to accrue capital to buy a home—all of the things a middle-class person does.

While unemployment is a problem for both men and women, a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute found that although women fared better than men in the great recession that began in 2007, in the sense that more men lost their jobs than women did, during the economic recovery, men are seeing stronger gains in employment than women are. For example, while both men and women saw employment gains in the health care and social assistance sector, male employment grew by 50 percent more than female employment. As the author of the report, Hilary Wething explained, “While the jobs gap for men is larger than it is for women, men are nevertheless seeing strong gains than women within most industries.”

The left-of-center Economic Policy Institutehas estimated that the expiration of the emergency jobless benefits program would reduce job growth by 310,000 positions next year because consumers over all would have less money to spend.

“It is absolutely clear that educational wage differentials have not driven wage inequality over the last 15 years,” said Lawrence Mishel, who heads the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning center for economic policy analysis. “Wage inequality has grown a lot over the last 15 years and the educational wage premium has changed little.”

… In coming weeks, Mr. Mishel and two co-authors, Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, expect to publish a study called “Don’t Blame the Robots: Assessing the Job Polarization Explanation of Growing Wage Inequality.”

Massachusetts had the highest rate of employer-sponsored health insurance coverage in the country during 2011-2012, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington.

The study found that in 11 of the past 12 years, rates of employer-sponsored health insurance have declined. Between 2011 and 2012, the national figure was 58.4 percent. In Massachusetts, it was 70.8 percent.

One of the advantages of pervasive corporate culture is health coverage — and Connecticut ranks No. 3 in the percentage of non-elderly people covered by a employer-based health plan, a new report shows.

This state had 69.7 percent of the under-65 population covered by policies from a workplace in 2011-12, the report by the Economic Policy Instituteshows. That trails only Massachusetts (71 percent) and New Hampshire (70 percent).

At the October pace of job creation, “it will still take five years to get back to the pre-recession unemployment rate of 5%,” said labor economist Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

To reach the 5 percent unemployment rate that prevailed in mid-2008 shortly before the bust, the country still needs to add 8 million jobs. Economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute notes that if payrolls continue growing at the same rate as they have over the last 12 months, unemployment won’t reach its pre-recession level until 2018.

The lapse in benefits is also expected to exert some drag on the economy. Michael Feroli, the chief economist of JP Morgan, estimates that the expiration of benefits will shave about 0.4 percentage points from first-quarter economic growth next year. The Economic Policy Instituterecently estimate that the lapse will cut GDP by about 0.2 percent and cost 310,000 jobs.

“Just surpassing the pre-recession level of employment doesn’t come close to doing it,” Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told TIME. “There’s still long way to go before getting back to health.” Had jobs growth been on track with population growth, women would have added over 3 million more jobs than what they’ve actually gained and men would have added over 5 million.

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Economic Policy Institute

EPI is an independent, nonprofit think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States. EPI’s research helps policymakers, opinion leaders, advocates, journalists, and the public understand the bread-and-butter issues affecting ordinary Americans.